24. Rhodes
— ? —
Rhodes
I’ve gotten good at backing off.
It’s not my natural skill set, ask anyone who’s ever worked for me, dated me, or had the misfortune of being my sibling.
But three weeks of watching Maren carefully maintain a professional distance, three weeks of her checking her phone during our site walks like someone’s waiting, three weeks of that soft smile she gets sometimes when she’s reading a message, I can take a hint. Eventually.
She has someone. Good for her - great, actually. She deserves someone who shows up, someone who doesn’t make her feel like something optional, someone who learned the lesson I apparently needed a divorce to understand.
So I’ve backed off.
My Saturday is supposed to be wall-to-wall meetings across town, Patricia scheduled them deliberately tight to keep everything on track.
The Livingston House electrical assessment needed sign-off this morning, and when I offered to have one of Maren’s staff handle it so she wouldn’t have to come in on her weekend, she insisted.
“I need to see the panel placement myself,” she said. “My arrangements are going to need power access in the northwest corner, and your contractor keeps moving the outlets.”
“I can relay whatever you need to Patricia.”
“Rhodes.” She said it with that particular exhaustion she reserves for when I’m being difficult. “I’ll be in and out before nine. You won’t even know I was there.”
So I let it go. Backed off. Like I’m learning to do.
Except now it’s eleven-fifteen and I’m walking back into Livingston House because I left the permit paperwork on the folding table we’ve been using as a makeshift desk, and my afternoon meeting with the city planning office will be spectacularly useless without them.
The front entrance is propped open, probably for the electricians. I don’t see anyone in the foyer. The building smells like sawdust and fresh paint and, underneath that, something floral. One of Maren’s test arrangements must be somewhere nearby.
I’m halfway to the ballroom when I hear her laugh.
It stops me mid-stride. Not because it’s unusual, Maren laughs with her staff all the time. But there’s something different about the quality of it. Lighter. More unguarded than she ever lets herself be around me.
Then I hear another laugh. Higher pitched. A child.
I assume a client brought their kid to a Saturday site visit. It happens. Parents don’t always have childcare, and Maren’s the type to accommodate. I’m already mentally cataloging which vendor might have a child that age when I round the corner into the unfinished ballroom.
The afternoon light pours through the tall windows, making the dust motes look like glitter.
Maren is crouched near the northwest corner, right where she said she needed those outlets, and she’s fixing the zipper on a small blue jacket.
A little boy stands in front of her, maybe three or four, squirming with the impatience of someone who has places to be.
“The flowers are boring,” he announces.
“They’re not boring.” Maren tugs the zipper up. “They’re ranunculus.”
“They don’t have spikes.”
“Not all flowers need spikes.”
“The good ones do.” He tips his head back, considering this. “Like stars.”
“Stars don’t have spikes either. Some of them have-”
“Stars are POINTY,” he says, with the exaggerated patience of a child correcting a very stupid adult. “They have points. Lots of them.”
“You’re right. I stand corrected.”
I’ve stopped walking.
I’m maybe twenty feet away, half-hidden by a stack of lumber the contractors haven’t moved yet, and something is happening in my chest that I don’t have words for. The boy turns slightly, reaching for something on the floor, a plastic rocket that’s seen better days, and I see his face in profile.
Dark eyes.
The same dark eyes I see in the mirror every morning.
He’s got a round face still, baby-soft, but there’s something in the set of his jaw.
The little crease that forms between his eyebrows when he’s concentrating.
I know that crease. I’ve had that crease pointed out to me by every woman I’ve ever dated, usually when I’m working through a problem and ignoring everything else.
My lungs forget how to work.
The boy says something else about rockets, I can’t process the words, there’s a roaring in my ears that sounds like blood and time and all the things I suddenly can’t unknow, and Maren laughs again, softer now, and brushes his hair back from his forehead.
She touches him the way you touch something precious. Something that belongs to you.
I look at the boy. At Maren. At the boy again.
He has a dimple. Just one, on the left side. It shows when he grins, which he’s doing now because he’s won some argument I didn’t hear. My hand drifts to my own face without permission, to the place where my dimple sits.
Same side.
Maren finishes with his jacket and stands, brushing off her knees, and something makes her look up. Instinct, maybe. The animal awareness of being watched.
Her eyes find mine across the half-finished ballroom.
Every drop of color drains from her face.
I’ve seen Maren scared before, seen her angry, heartbroken, exhausted, defiant. I’ve never seen her look like this. Like the ground has just opened up beneath her feet and she’s trying to figure out whether to jump or let herself fall.
The boy is still chattering. Something about how his friend at school has a lizard, and lizards are better than flowers but not as good as rockets, and could they get a lizard, please, Mama said maybe and maybe means yes if he’s patient-
Mama.
He called her Mama.
My vision narrows. The ballroom, the sawdust, the light, it all goes slightly fuzzy at the edges, and there’s only this boy with my eyes and my dimple and the crease between his eyebrows that means he’s frustrated with the world’s failure to immediately produce a lizard.
Three years of dates start rearranging themselves in my head.
Maren left me four years ago. Four years, come fall. She left, and I spent months not knowing where she was, and I stood on the sidewalk outside the old shop until my feet went numb, hoping she’d walk out of a life I no longer had access to, and she never…
She never-
The boy notices me. His chatter stops mid-sentence, and he peers around Maren’s legs with the suspicious curiosity of a child encountering a stranger. “Mama, who’s that?”
Mama.
Maren’s hand comes down on his shoulder. Protective. Her fingers are white-knuckled.
“That’s-” Her voice catches. She clears her throat. “That’s someone Mama works with, sweetheart.”
“Why is he staring?”
Good question. I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure I could form words right now if my life depended on it. The math keeps running in my head, over and over, a calculation I can’t stop making even though I already know the sum.
Three years. He said three years old. If he’s three, and Maren left four years ago…
No - wait. He might be four. Kids that age don’t always know their exact ages. He could be almost four, or just turned three, or-
“Is he okay?” the boy asks, frowning up at his mother. “He looks weird.”
“He’s fine.” Maren’s voice is too bright. I know that voice. That’s her crisis management voice, the one she uses when everything is falling apart and she needs five more minutes to figure out what to do. “Hey, why don’t you go show Camila your rocket? I bet she’s in the front room.”
“I want to stay with you.”
“I know, baby, but Mama needs to talk to, I need to talk to Mr.-”
She can’t even say my name.
“Maren.” It comes out rough. Barely a word at all.
The boy’s head whips toward me, curious now. “That’s Mama’s name. How come you know Mama’s name?”
I’m walking toward them. I didn’t decide to do this, but my legs are moving anyway, eating up the distance between us. Maren takes a half-step back, pulling the boy with her, and that small gesture, that flinch, like I’m dangerous, feels like a knife between my ribs.
I stop about eight feet away. Close enough to see the details now. The exact shade of his eyes. The way his hair curls at the temples, darker than Maren’s, closer to…
Closer to mine.
“How old is he?”
The question drops out of me before I can stop it.
Maren’s chin comes up. That stubborn angle I’ve never forgotten. “Rhodes, we should-”
“How old is he?”
“Not here.” Her eyes dart to the boy, then back to me. “Not now.”
“Maren-”
“Don’t.”
“How old?”
The silence stretches. The boy is looking between us with the growing awareness that something is wrong, that the adults are doing that thing adults do when they’re pretending everything is fine but their voices are too tight and their smiles are too fake.
“Mama.” He tugs at her hand. “Mama, he’s being weird.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“Tell him to stop.”
She doesn’t answer. She’s looking at me, and I see the moment she realizes she can’t make me leave. Can’t make this go away. Can’t buy herself another three and a half years of silence.
Her hand tightens around the boy’s fingers.
“Rhodes, don’t.”
I hear her. I understand what she’s asking. Not here, not in front of him, not like this. And maybe if I were a better man, I’d walk away, give her time to prepare, let her control this the way she’s clearly been controlling it for years.
But I’m not a better man. I’m just a man staring at a little boy who has his face.
“How old?”
The boy tips his head back. Looks at me with my own eyes.
“I’m three,” he says. Then, with the very serious correction of a child who has recently had a birthday and considers the distinction important: “And a half.”
Three and a half.
Maren left four years ago. She left, and she was already, she’d have been…
The timeline clicks into place with the force of a physical blow.
The reconciliation. That last night before everything fell apart for good. Chinese food on the living room floor. The crooked ranunculus on the coffee table. Her body against mine, one more time, because we couldn’t stop loving each other even when we couldn’t stop hurting each other.
I remember thinking, the next morning, that it felt like a beginning. Like maybe we’d finally figured out how to reach each other again.
She left a few weeks later.
Blocked my number. Vanished. Let me spend months thinking I’d lost her forever, let me beg her sister for any sign she was okay, let me stand outside her flower shop like a ghost…
And the whole time.
The whole time, she was…
Maren’s face has gone pale as milk. She knows I’ve done the math. She knows I know.
I look at my son.
My son, who has my eyes and my dimple and my stubborn frown and who’s looking at me like I’m a stranger. Because I’m a stranger to him. Because his mother decided I should be.
The room tilts.
“Rhodes.” Maren’s voice comes from very far away.
“Three and a half,” I hear myself say.
The boy shifts closer to his mother, suddenly shy, suddenly uncertain. He can feel the tension in the air even if he doesn’t understand it. His small hand clutches Maren’s fingers like she’s the only solid thing in a world that’s stopped making sense.
I know the feeling.
I take one step back. Then another. My legs don’t feel like they belong to me anymore.
Nothing feels like it belongs to me anymore.
I’ve spent three and a half years not knowing I had a son, and now I’m standing in an unfinished ballroom watching him hide behind his mother’s legs because he’s scared of the stranger who won’t stop staring.
The stranger.
That’s what I am to my own child.
A stranger.
“Rhodes, please-” Maren starts.
I turn around and walk out of the ballroom.